We All Need Heroes

COLONEL SANDERS

Chapter: Never Give Up

The Colonel Sanders’ story about founding Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is truly inspiring. Harland Sanders was born on September 9, 1890. He was the oldest of three, and had a younger sister and brother. His father died when he was six years old. By the age of seven, his mother taught him the art of cooking because she was forced to go to work, and he had to feed himself and his two siblings. He quickly learnt to master many dishes, and the skill he acquired would change his life in the future. Sanders dropped out of school in seventh grade. When his mother remarried, he ran away from home because his stepfather beat him.
    During his early years, Sanders had many jobs, including being a steamboat pilot, insurance salesman, railroad fireman and farmer. At the age of 40, Sanders took up cooking as a profession. He began cooking chicken-based dishes and other meals for people who stopped at his service station in Corbin, Kentucky. Since he did not have a restaurant, he served customers in his adjacent living quarters. Locally, his popularity grew, and Sanders eventually bought and moved into a motel that had a 142-seat restaurant. Over the next nine years he developed his “secret recipe” for frying chicken, using a pressure fryer that cooked the chicken much faster than pan frying would. In 1935, he was made into an honorary Colonel by the governor of Kentucky for his cooking skills.
    At the age of 65, Sanders had to shut down his motel-restaurant because of plans to build a new highway where it was located. At that point he decided to retire from the tough life he had led and the hard work he had done. A while later he received his first social security check, which was for only $105, and he started to wonder how he was going to survive financially. This was the beginning of his journey to open KFC.
    As an elderly, Sanders did not just sit back and wait for things to happen. He decided to franchise his fried chicken at the not so young age of 65. Sanders traveled around by car, offering his fried chicken to restaurant owners. He cooked the chicken on the spot and let the owner try it. If the owner liked the chicken, he hoped it would result in an agreement to sell his fried chicken. How many times do you think Sanders heard “no” before getting the answer he wanted? It’s said that he was refused 1,009 times (!) before he heard the first “yes”. He spent two years driving across North America in his old, beat-up car, sleeping in the back seat in his rumpled white suit, getting up each day, eager to share his cooking with someone new. After he got his first positive answer, the success story of KFC had begun. By 1964, Colonel Sanders had 600 restaurants selling his trademark fried chicken. Sanders sold the entire KFC franchising operation the same year for $2 million ($14,987,124 by todays standards). He died at the age of 90 (allowing him to enjoy his success for more than 15 years), and had up until then traveled 250,000 miles every year visiting all the KFC outlets he’d founded. The Colonel became the still famous company icon, identified by his glasses, white mustache and beard, black string tie and walking stick.

Possible Moral
It seems it’s never too late to turn your dreams into reality. Colonel Sanders’ story has become a symbol of great entrepreneurial spirit. He truly had a “Never-Give -Up” attitude. It’s common for entrepreneurs to face failure in their first business(es). The lesson to be learned is that every time you do something, you learn from it, and you find a way to do it better next time. Instead of feeling bad about the last restaurant that had rejected his idea, Sanders immediately started focusing on how to tell his story more effectively and get better results from the next restaurant.


Story from We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish.
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